Our recent work on the self-assembly of nanoparticles on a glycol surface was accepted for publication in Langmuir. Exciting in situ X-ray scattering experiments done with the amazing Detlef Smilgies at CHESS. It is also Tyler’s first paper, congrats!
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.langmuir.0c00524

Kevin successfully defended his PhD Thesis! Congrats Kevin for an outstanding job. Thanks for the bold and curiosity-driven approach to research which introduced our group to the myriad prospects of pulsed electrochemistry as a novel approach to control product selectivity

Porous materials are notoriously difficult to process, so synthetic materials are mostly in the form of powder but generally lack mesoscale structure much less processability into complex device architectures. Natural systems, on the other hand, a replete with complex hierarchical and multifunctional structures. Inspired by the beautifully complex hierarchical structures found in nature, we sought to create analogous programmable materials from inorganic building blocks. The work described in the enclosed manuscript illustrates the rich opportunity space that opened up at the intersection from recent concurrent advances in (digital) additive manufacturing and nanostructured material building blocks. We show, for the first time, that three-dimensional hierarchical materials can be printed into porous structured based on oxozirconium methacrylate cluster building blocks. This work demarks a significant step forward in creating hierarchical porous structures with control over complex macroscopic structure as well as controlled pore size distribution. The advances towards programmable porous materials reported in this manuscript have important implications for a broad range of emerging technologies spanning microfluidic bioseparation and programmable multiphase flow through porous structures.

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded an interdisciplinary team of Cornell researchers $2 million to study the combination of inorganic semiconductor nanoparticles and bacterial cells for more efficient bioenergy conversion.